Come on Sarge, as everybody knows, voters are angry at Washington for not getting things done like passing health care yet, so they voted for Scott Brown to send a message to those fat cats holding up progress.

The sad fact of the matter is that this is the Democrat's official talking point.

This is precisely what Howard Dean said to Chris Matthews yesterday. Matthews looked at Dean like he'd lost a screw or something.

Matthews was totally befuddled by this line of reasoning because it's intentionally stupid, but said with a straight face.

It's an amalgam of Washingtonspeak that Democrats know is bullshit, but it sounds pundity.

Morons like Bazelon spew it so they sound like they know what they're talking about, and unless you're really on top of the news you'd never really notice just how stupid that construct is.

The only true reason that Dems can take any consolation, out of all the various reason they lost this race, is that people always want change, especially in bad times. The grass is greener excuse is as good as the truth gets Dems. The rest is directed directly at mishandled Dem control .

That women should broaden their horizons to include men in the trades or essentially to include men who were more helpmates than career competitors-- when I floated that same idea to female law firm associates several years ago, they either ignored me or looked at me aghast. Has something changed?

You can have it all. You can make more than your husband and still be, er...satisfied by him. Of course someday he may suddenly up and murder you, but that price is way down the road...if it happens at all. And what a small price to pay it will be after years of living your totally fulfilled and fulfilling feminist life...with your man waiting in the wings, on call for those moments when, perhaps, you might have need of him.

1.) Likeability. For a Republican to win in Mass, he (or she) has to be likable to overcome the strange, mean, tight-ass Republican stereotype that Democrats have cultivated for decades. Bill Weld and Mitt Romney were able to do that before, too, but...

4.) Identification. What Weld and Romney couldn't accomplish when running for senate against Kerry and Kennedy (aside from running against strong incumbents) was shake the outsider or patrician image. Sure, Mass voters will hire them as "outside managers" (governors) to keep the state house Democrats in line, but sending them in to Washington to represent the state to the rest of the country -- huge difference. From his manner, idioms and accent, Scott Brown embodies the Mass suburban working class from which he came and those who voted for him. Despite the TV good looks and his family's media prominence at times, people who know him say the same thing: he's a sincere, humble, hard-working public servant.

4.) Self interest. Coakley would be a rubber stamp. Brown's 41st vote would be both cautious and valuable. Brown's argument against funding a too big to fail national health care plan, given that Massachusetts was already paying for its plan, was just too cogent an argument for her to overcome.

Brown loves retail politics. I got to travel on his bus tour on Saturday. He shakes every hand, no matter how long it takes. When the venue is too full, we helped him into the bed of a pick-up truck with a bullhorn. It was really exciting, historic stuff. Exhausted, he still drank Bud Light with us on bus back from the last stop.

One of the stops was in Hyannis, two miles from the Kennedy compound. The crowd at Tommy Doyle's bar spilled out and filled the downtown. The band on stage was playing Dylan's The Times They Are A Changing. It was so appropriate, not contrived and not out of place in the least. I've been to many Democrat events; socially, the Brown crowds and the vibe were indistinguishable.

Issues aside, Scott Brown made being a Republican cool and indigenous to the suburban Mass working and professional classes, and made strong inroads in urban areas, like South Boston.

Talking about finding your own Todd Palin is interesting. What I always think of is an early clip of Sarah Palin after one of his Iron Dog wins, pre-governor time I think.

I found it striking.

The reporter asked her the typical ha-ha do-you-treat-him-like-a-child socially acceptable boiler-plate "Will you LET him do this again?"

Our culture does that sort of thing constantly to men and it's every bit as offensive as any suggestion that a woman has to ask her husband's permission. Wouldn't that upset most of us? Some idea or suggestion that we, as a wife, have to ask *permission*?

It's not cute.

Instead of going along with the ha-ha, yeah, I'll *let* him race again, or else some sly, reference to whatever it costs him to get her permission... she said it wasn't up to her, what he did. Not her decision to make.

If ladies are going to start trying to find their very own "masculine without being domineering" Todd Palins, they're going to have to figure out how not to be an emasculating jerk.

I think of my own parents, not that my mother was all that powerful. She was a Phi Beta Kappa from Denison and my dad was a high school dropout. They were very happily married for almost 40 years until she died. I think it worked because she was smart enough to realize that in his own field he was at least as smart as she was and also had the common sense to go along with it and he was smart enough to realize that she had the learning and it did not reflect on him at all. There was no gotcha to it when it came to them. It took me until I grew up to realize what was truly going on and to appreciate them both for their varied knowledge.

I think that is why it truly bothers me when I see couples play snarky games with each other and dissing each other in public. I don't see how that can be good for any relationship.

The idea that you have to marry/date only within your narrow social or economic group is ruining the lives of many because they limit their choices and limit their chances at happiness.

My husband is a plumber, I'm a stock broker. I went to college, he didn't. We come from different social/economic backgrounds. He is the most honorable, intelligent, savvy, humorous,loyal, entrepreneurial and hardest working person I know. (and much better speller than I am. He's my go to guy for spell check)

Sometimes I make more in a very short time than he makes in a month. Sometimes he is the breadwinner because my business is in a slump. Believe me his money is soooo much harder earned than mine and I appreciate and recognize that.

What is more important than jousting about who makes what or who has a degree or not is your compatibility and respect for the qualities that one has that the other lacks. Together you are a whole.

One thing he and I laugh and wonder about is: How in the world can a marriage exist when there are decades separating the two people? How can you share inside jokes, music, common cultural experiences with just a phrase or without having to explain yourself to a spouse who live in a generation or even two generations removed.

I remain close to a girlfriend from when I was in college. She just lost her father this summer, and I lost my mother maybe six years ago. And for both of us, the parent lost was the dominant one in their marriage. And that is probably why we didn't work as a couple way back then. Her mother's life revolved around her father's, and that is what she has done in her marriage.

My mother on the other hand was somewhat like Dick's - Phi Beta Kappa from Carlton/U. Ill., and a bunch of other awards, including outstanding science student at Ill. in 1945. Then a traditional marriage with 5 boys. The difference is that my father was a small firm/solo attorney for almost 50 years. But they saw the world, more than once, and she drove that, plus a lot else.

The relevance of this is that I grew up with the experience and expectation of a very strong woman as a mate, because that is the girl that married dear old dad.

I look back to my college days, and maybe the decade after that, and realize that a big part of the problems that I had with women then was just this expectation - who was going to be the stronger, the dominant one. And, it turns out that they were looking for the guy to be dominant in the relationship, and I was looking for the girl to be.

Partly though, it really doesn't matter who has the more demanding career. For the last 25 years, I have had the higher profile career, and yet, the women were clearly dominant. I find a real comfort level in knowing that a woman will push back when I push too hard and that I can't run over them.

I do like the Palin model for strong women much better than I like the Clinton or Edwards model. My guess is that both of those women would have ultimately been happier with a Todd Palin than the alpha males that they ended up marrying, esp. with the extra curricular benefits that come with being such alpha males. Maybe I read too much into it, but I see both of these women as being very smart, educated, and ambitious women who ended up standing behind the successes of their husbands, when they probably, deep down, would have preferred being in front.

Morons like Bazelon spew it so they sound like they know what they're talking about, and unless you're really on top of the news you'd never really notice just how stupid that construct is.

I don't think that it is idiocy, but rather, denial. You know, the river down the middle of Egypt. And maybe cognitive dissonance.

Ms. Bazelon seems so convinced that ObamaCare solves all of the world's problems, and that everyone should be excited by it, that she seems unable to comprehend that a majority of Americans just don't want it, at least as it is currently constructed. They must be naive and uneducated in the subject because she and all the smart liberals around her know that it is just what the country needs.

So, we are seeing the reaction by many of the liberals so heavily in denial right now the tendency to just double down. If they just explained it better, it would pass with America aboard.

But the problem for them is that the public is not uneducated by it, but rather, many of those attending the Tea Parties and blogging on the Internet know far more about the subject than many of its supporters, and the more they know about the pending bills, the more they get scared.

Or pushing their husbands to succeed because they'd be personally uncomfortable in their social circles if their husband's success didn't exceed their own.

In all likelihood Bill Clinton's ambition was all his own, but suppose he got his law degree and just wanted to be a lawyer, put in a whole day's work on relatively ordinary thing, maybe have his own law firm some day there in Arkansas... and suppose Hillary was super focused and ran for office and got to be Governor at about the same time Bill did and then decided to run for President.

How would her friends react to her politically unambitious lawyer husband and his little podunk law office?

The so-called liberated womyn who "hated gender stereotypes" seem to be the ones suffering here. They want someone their equal, whatever that may be, but heaven forfend they find a carpenter they like or an 8 figure entrepreneur who rings their bell. No wonder these broads are angry and depressed all the time.

The ones who get it (in more ways than one) on both sides are the ones who understand it's the person; all the materialistic nonsense doesn't count when the going gets rough. It's whom can you count on.

vbspurs said...

OT: Air America, DONE.

I chose the wrong week to give up Schadenfreude.

You can always fall off the wagon, dear.

wv: mondejud. Uh, is that anti-semitic?

Comes out something like Jewish world. Only the people who think that way will see it that way (No, I know you don't think that way, vb).

They want someone their equal, whatever that may be, but heaven forfend they find a carpenter they like or an 8 figure entrepreneur who rings their bell.

What evidence do you have of that? I can think of two of my colleagues, both feminists, one who's marrying a contractor - a Wyoming cowboy - and the other whose husband put himself through grad school working as a carpenter and painter. Another is married to a self-employed handy man - not quite a contractor, but he's doing pretty well, with post-Katrina renovations still going on. Another is married to a plumber. I have no sense at all that the straight, feminist academics I know dislike men in the trades, non-academic professions, or who are working class. Sounds like a convenient conservative fantasy/stereotype to me.

DBQ: A good question, seems strange to me too. My maternal grandmother was 20 and my grandfather was 50 when they married. They had 3 children (the youngest born when he was 60), and had been married 47 years when he died at age 97. She lived independently for 22 after his death. I asked her how they handled the age difference, and she said he always seemd younger, and she always seemd older (in fact, her hair was grey by age 30). Another difference (one of many): She was a straight ticket voting Democrat, and he was a straight ticket voting Republican. That never caused them any problems either.